A fantasy sport is a type of online game where participants assemble imaginary or virtual teams of real players of a professional sport. These teams compete based on the statistical performance of those players' players in actual games. This performance is converted into points that are compiled and totaled according to a roster selected by each fantasy team's manager. These point systems can be compiled and calculated using computers tracking actual results of the professional sport. In fantasy sports, team owners draft, trade and cut (drop) players, analogously to real sports.
Examples of fantasy sports include: daily fantasy sports, fantasy auto racing, fantasy baseball, fantasy basketball, fantasy boxing, fantasy congress, fantasy cricket, fantasy eSports—contests played based on the results of multiplayer online games such as League of Legends and Counter-Strike, fantasy F1, fantasy football (American), fantasy football (Australian rules football), fantasy football (e.g FIFA soccer and Association), fantasy golf, fantasy hockey, fantasy MMA, fantasy rugby league, fantasy sports stock simulations, fantasy surfing, fantasy professional wrestling.
Daily fantasy sports, an accelerated variant of the concept, began to experience a major increase in prominence in 2014 and 2015. Daily fantasy games are played across shorter periods of time, such as a single week of a season, rather than an entire season. Daily fantasy games are typically played as “contests” subject to an entry fee, which funds an advertised prize pool and is partially raked-off as revenue for the service. The daily fantasy market is saturated primarily by the two competing services DraftKings and FanDuel, which both received venture capital investments from various firms, including sports teams and broadcasters, and became known for running aggressive marketing campaigns with an emphasis on large cash prizes.
There are many different methods of organizing of fantasy football leagues, for example, some of which may be combined. The two most popular league types are head-to-head and total points leagues.
In head-to-head leagues, a fantasy team matches up against a different fantasy team from the league each week. The team that receives the most points of the two receives a win for that week. Points are dictated by the scoring system that is either standard set by the website or custom set by the league. A team's total is the sum of all players' points in the starting lineup. Teams with the best win-loss record advance to the playoffs. If two teams have the same record, tiebreakers are employed based on league preference.
Just as in real football, each year fantasy football leagues have a draft (in dynasty leagues, this normally consists of NFL rookies only), in which each team drafts NFL players. These players are kept unless they are traded or dropped, whereby they enter a pool of unowned players that any team may claim. In most leagues, no player may be owned by more than one team, although some leagues do allow for this.
In an auction draft, each owner has an imaginary budget which he must use to purchase all his players in an auction format. Owners take turns nominating players for open bid. The owner who bids the highest on each player receives that player, reducing their remaining budget accordingly. Auction drafts are viewed as the more fair method since every owner begins on equal ground. A few leagues use a hybrid of the two styles, selecting a portion of their roster via auction, with the remainder selected through a serpentine method.
Each owner assigns his/her team a name, which can be based on anything. Each team is allowed a pre-determined number of players on its team, as well as a specified number at each position that can or must be used in each game (the “starters”). Owners for each team then determine each week which players will start (within the rules) and which will be “benched”. Just like in real football, bench players can become starters for various reasons: due to other players' injury, poor performance, or if another player's team has a bye.
Each week, owners choose their starters for a game before a certain deadline. Whether to sit or start a player is usually based on strategic considerations including the player's past and expected performance, defensive match ups, and so on.
Each team owner must designate which players from the team roster will be starters each week—i.e. the only players who will “score” any points. The following example is similar to many common formats required for a starting lineup:
1 Quarterback (QB)
2 Running Backs (RB)
2 Wide Receivers (WR)
1 Flex RB/WR/TEs (RB/WR/TE)
1 Tight End (TE)
1 Placekicker (K)
1 Team Defense/Special Teams (D/ST)
6 Bench (BN)
There are many variants on this. Some leagues use individual defensive players (IDPs) (and in some cases a punter) instead of or in addition to a combined Team Defense/Special Teams. Some other leagues use separate Defense and Special Teams. Another variant is the “flex” position, which can be filled by a player in one of several positions. Flex positions are often limited to “WR/TE”, “RB/WR”, or “RB/WR/TE”. Traditionally, this flex was required to be an RB, WR, or TE; however, some leagues allow any position to fill this flex slot as an “OP” (any Offensive Player).
League managers earn their team points based on their starting players' performances in weekly NFL games. Players accumulate points based purely on their statistical output. For example, a touchdown might be worth six points while each yard passed, rushed, or carried may be worth a certain amount of points, and so on. In most cases, players earn points for passing, rushing, and receiving yards.
Although kickers can theoretically score points through touchdowns or yards rushed and received, they accumulate most of their points through field goals and extra points. The Team Defense/Special Teams position earns points through defensive plays (such as turnovers, quarterback sacks, safeties, and blocked kicks) and by limiting the offensive points of the opposing teams. Also, whereas points are awarded to players for positive plays, points are taken away from players for negative plays such as turnovers or missed kicks.
The standard fantasy football scoring system comprises a well-respected baseline of statistic/point-value pairs designed to promote balance across the various fantasy positions. This is the typical scoring configuration chosen by first time fantasy football commissioners because it is a very basic points system which is fair and intuitive for fantasy novices.
A typical standard scoring format would look very similar to this, although there may be slight discrepancies in points awarded to kickers (depending on your league host's scoring limitations):
1 point for 25 passing yards
1 point for 10 rushing yards
1 point for 10 receiving yards
6 points for a touchdown
4 points for a passing touchdown
−2 points for every interception thrown or fumble lost
1 point for each extra point made
3 points for each 0-39 yard field goal, 4 points for each 40-49 yard field goal, and
5 points for each 50+ yard field goal
2 points per turnover gained by defense
1 point per sack by the defense
2 points for a safety by defense
6 points for each touchdown scored by defense
2 points for each blocked kick
Points-per-reception leagues were created as an effort to make wide receivers and tight ends more relevant to fantasy scoring. In this alternate scoring system, fractional or full points are awarded for every reception tallied by a player. This changes the value of players in standard scoring systems, as running backs who catch many passes become more valuable, those who catch fewer are less valuable, and so on. Certain leagues vary the points respective positions earn for receptions.
Another scoring system counts only touchdowns, touchdown passes, and field goals for points. Many of the first fantasy football leagues were pure-scoring leagues as this provided for easier tracking of team points throughout the season. As the game matured and moved online, it became easier to track yardage and more sophisticated scoring configurations were adopted.
An alternate scoring format is the “pure yardage” league, in which touchdowns are ignored, and each player's passing, rushing and receiving yards are totaled. Some yardage leagues also convert defensive stats into yards (ex., 50 yards for an interception, 20 yards for a sack), whether for a team's defense, or individual players.
An alternative method for scoring defense is Individual Defensive Players or IDP fantasy football. The main difference being that players typically draft anywhere from 3 to 7 individual defensive players during a draft as opposed to just one team defense. Sometimes there are required positions to fill like 2 Linebackers, 2 Defensive Backs and 2 Defensive Linemen and sometimes it's just 5 defensive players of any position you choose. There are many different ways to draft IDPs and many have found this makes the later part of the fantasy draft more exciting. For instance, instead of drafting a 5th wide receiver in the 16th round that will typically be on your bench or dropped part way through the season, you are instead drafting a “full-time” starting defensive player that can help you win your league.
Some leagues allow bonuses to be awarded to players for exceptionally good performances, like a QB throwing for over 300 yards. Running backs or wide receivers could similarly be awarded a performance bonus based on accumulating more than 100 yards on the ground or through the air. Kickers could even be awarded for long field goals, generally 50 yards or longer.
The way a fantasy owner watches a game is greatly affected if a player on their team is playing. An owner will root for specific things to happen in order for their player(s) to score points. For example, someone who has a running back will root for a goal line situation or for the team the running back plays for to be up by a significant amount of points. If the running back's team is on the goal line, then a running play is more likely to be called. If the running back's team is up by a significant amount of points, his team will call more running plays in order to run out the clock. The more running plays called, the more points for that running back. Different scenarios will provide certain players an opportunity to score points for fantasy owners.
A digital video recorder (DVR), sometimes referred to by the merchandising term personal video recorder (PVR), is a consumer electronics device or application software that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card, SSD or other local or networked mass storage device. The term includes set-top boxes (STB) with direct to disk recording facility, portable media players (PMP) with recording, TV gateways with network and local recordings, recorders (PMR) as camcorders that record onto Secure Digital memory cards and software for personal computers which enables video capture and playback to and from a hard disk drive. A television set with built-in digital video-recording facilities was introduced by LG in 2007, followed by other manufacturers.
Consumer digital video recorders ReplayTV and TiVo were launched at the 1999 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, USA. Microsoft also demonstrated a unit with DVR capability, but this did not become available until the end of 1999 for full DVR features in Dish Network's DISHplayer receivers. TiVo shipped their first units on Mar. 31, 1999. ReplayTV won the “Best of Show” award in the video category with Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen as an early investor and board member, but TiVo was more successful commercially. While early legal action by media companies forced ReplayTV to remove many features such as automatic commercial skip and the sharing of recordings over the Internet, newer devices have steadily regained these functions while adding complementary abilities, such as recording onto DVDs and programming and remote control facilities using PDAs, networked PCs, and Web browsers.
Hard-disk based digital video recorders make the “time shifting” feature (traditionally done by a VCR) much more convenient, and also allow for “trick modes” such as pausing live TV, instant replay of interesting scenes, chasing playback where a recording can be viewed before it has been completed, and skipping of advertising. Most DVRs use the MPEG format for compressing the digitized video signals. Video recording capabilities have become an essential part of the modern set-top box, as TV viewers have wanted to take control of their viewing experiences. As consumers have been able to converge increasing amounts of video content on their set-tops, delivered by traditional ‘broadcast’ cable, satellite and terrestrial as well as IP networks, the ability to capture programming and view it whenever they want has become a must-have function for many consumers.
At the 1999 CES, Dish Network demonstrated the hardware that would later have DVR capability with the assistance of Microsoft software. which also included WebTV Networks internet TV. By the end of 1999 the Dishplayer had full DVR capabilities and within a year, over 200,000 units were sold.
Many satellite, cable and IPTV companies are incorporating digital video recording functions into their set-top box, such as with DirecTiVo, DISHPlayer/DishDVR, Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8xxx from Time Warner, Total Home DVR from AT&T U-verse, Motorola DCT6412 from Comcast and others, Moxi Media Center by Digeo (available through Charter, Adelphia, Sunflower, Bend Broadband, and soon Comcast and other cable companies), or Sky+. Astro introduced their DVR system, called Astro MAX, which was the first PVR in Malaysia but was phased out two years after its introduction.
In the case of digital television, there is no encoding necessary in the DVR since the signal is already a digitally encoded MPEG stream. The digital video recorder simply stores the digital stream directly to disk. Having the broadcaster involved with, and sometimes subsidizing, the design of the DVR can lead to features such as the ability to use interactive TV on recorded shows, pre-loading of programs, or directly recording encrypted digital streams. It can, however, also force the manufacturer to implement non-skippable advertisements and automatically expiring recordings.
In 2003 many Satellite and Cable providers introduced dual-tuner digital video recorders. In the UK, BSkyB introduced their first PVR Sky+ with dual tuner support in 2001. These machines have two independent tuners within the same receiver. The main use for this feature is the capability to record a live program while watching another live program simultaneously or to record two programs at the same time, possibly while watching a previously recorded one. Kogan.com introduced a dual-tuner PVR in the Australian market allowing free-to-air television to be recorded on a removable hard drive. Some dual-tuner DVRs also have the ability to output to two separate television sets at the same time. The PVR manufactured by UEC (Durban, South Africa) and used by Multichoice and Scientific Atlanta 8300DVB PVR have the ability to view two programs while recording a third using a triple tuner.
Where several digital subchannels are transmitted on a single RF channel, some PVRs can record two channels and view a third, so long as all three subchannels are on two channels (or one).